


haunted ground.

by marquis



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, Post-Breach, i don't know what this is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 15:14:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marquis/pseuds/marquis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton tries to fix a house. Hermann tries to fix Newton.<br/>(Or the one where sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things really just don't go the way you wanted them to and nothing is the same after the world almost ends.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	haunted ground.

**Author's Note:**

> For the Pacific Rim-a-Thon, for which I am on Team Lady Danger. :) I'm not too good at graphics or any of that, so. Here. :) Have a fic.  
> Inspired by [this poem](http://laughingcrying.tumblr.com/post/62865602834/do-not-love-an-empty-run-down-house-although-you). Title taken from it, as well.

Newton Geizler was no fool.

Or, well, he might have been. A little bit. Because something was definitely on fire in the lab, and he had no idea what or why. He’d only been unplugging a few of Hermann’s things, anyway, and it isn’t like one of them was _meant_ to set off fireworks when he pulled the plug –

The lights flickered out and then came back on, an eerie red glow lighting up the room. Newt experienced about ten seconds of confusion before the sprinklers went off. Something started shrieking loudly off to his right.

“Aha,” Newt sighed, pushing a wet strand of hair out of his eyes. “I’m guessing that’s the alarm.”

\--

Hermann Gottlieb was no fool.

While it was true that he might have been breathing heavily upon awakening – and, in fact, still was having difficulty getting himself under control – he had come to the conclusion that it had only been a dream. Newton couldn’t possibly have set the lab on _fire_ ; they had agreed to begin packing in the morning, sorting out what could be preserved for future testing.

What he needed was a nice cup of tea to calm his nerves, that’s all; he’d been on edge ever since exiting the Drift, even when Mako and Raleigh had been brought safely back to the Shatterdome. Even when the clock was stopped and the now excess staff sent back to their families. He was constantly on edge, his leg throbbing and hands shaking.

Yes, right. Tea. He opened the door to his room and –

Something was ringing down the hall. It sounded eerily familiar, and it took only a moment or two before Hermann realized why: That was the same sound he’d heard in his dream _. That was the lab’s fire alarm_.

“Newton!” he called out, hoping against all odds that his partner was still in his own room across the hall. No reply came, and after waiting for just a moment more, Hermann started on his trek to the lab, cane clicking against the floor.

It was hardly coincidence anymore, although Hermann couldn’t even begin to explain exactly what it had to be instead. This was very far out of his realm of expertise, far enough that it very well might still be a dream. He didn’t know. When he got to the lab, he could hear Newton yelling.

“The fire’s out! Shut the fuck up!”

The door to the lab opened after a bit of hard work on his part, pushing past the heavy metal to find a puddle on the other side. Newton was at work on the control panel, pulling cables and flipping switches. From what Hermann could see, the fire was really out; after a moment or two, the lights turned back on and the alarm went silent. And then Newton turned around to find him standing there,.

“Strangest thing, Hermann. It just went off all on its own,” he said, crossing his arms. He was in the same outfit that he had been in Hermann’s dream – hardly unusual, considering he most likely only had two shirts and one ridiculous tie in his possession anyhow – only it was a lot damper now, white fabric nearly transparent where it clung to the inked skin underneath.

Which was something Hermann could think about later. Or, preferably, never again.

“Newton, we agreed not to start packing again until tomorrow,” he reprimanded, looking around the lab. Most of the papers had been cleaned out on his side of the room and the chalkboards had been clear for at least three days now, thank god, but the electronics were likely ruined.

Newton turned away and started to shuffle his own papers into a pile, even as they tore and disintegrated in his hands. “I know, but I – I couldn’t sleep. I felt twitchy. Or something. I don’t know, I just thought it might be nice to get a head start and all, considering I’m not the most organized person on the planet.”

This would usually be the time that Herman would take to make a bitter remark on Newton’s organizational skills. Something in the slump of Newton’s shoulders told him that it wouldn’t be wise, though, so he bit his tongue and said instead, “Leave the papers and get out of those wet clothes, Newton. We’ll see if there’s anything to help you get to sleep and worry about everything else in the morning.”

Newton gave him a small, grateful smile and followed him out of the lab.

\--

Newt considered himself to be pretty damn intelligent. He could build a helmet for drifting out of old parts, could cut open a kaiju and examine its DNA, could do any manner of things that he knew most people couldn’t.

What he could not figure out, though, was what was going on with Hermann. It’d been almost a week since the last time he’d been insulted or ridiculed, and that _had_ to be some kind of record.

Admittedly, he had been far less sarcastic. But people had never been his strength, and after being inside the head of Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, it was considerably harder to make fun of him. Newt didn’t know how to approach the topic of everything he’d seen and heard in the Drift, scenes of a little Hermann running around happily without a cane or a sour face.

It seemed unlikely that Hermann would be having the same problem, anyway. Newt hadn’t lived a particularly emotional life, when he really thought about it. But, then again, it was his. He’d known about his life story for as long as he’d been alive. Hermann probably felt the same way about his own.

Mostly he just wished that Hermann would stop fretting over him. He’d had enough pretentious tea to last him the rest of his lifetime, and sleep was never going to come any easier no matter what they - he did.

The dreams weren’t going away.

\--

The marshal was not pleased upon walking into the lab that morning, as Hermann knew he wouldn’t be. “What happened here?” he demanded, looking over the busted equipment.

“Faulty alarm,” Newton answered automatically, just as he had to every other person that day. He went back to fiddling with his unaffected kaiju parts, carefully avoiding eye contact.

Herc Hansen took a step forward. Hermann sighed loudly to get his attention; of course, Newton stared as well, and shook his hands a little frantically, mouthing the words _please_ and _don’t you dare_.

“Actually, Marshal,” he supplied, “you might want to watch where you step. There are puddles everywhere.”

And the marshal looked surprised, but not nearly so surprised as Newton did, scalpel falling from his fingers and mouth dropping open.

When the marshal walked over to the control panel, presumably to intimidate the electrician into telling him that nothing had actually been wrong in the wiring at all, Hermann rolled his eyes and raised an eyebrow at Newton. As if he’d tell the marshal.

\--

The Shatterdome was eerily empty as of late, without the loud tick of the clock and the constant sounds of construction. The only workers left were those of absolute necessity, broken into two groups: the ones with nowhere else to go, and the ones who had to clean up the mess. Newt wasn’t entirely sure which group he had been in previously, but he obviously wasn’t considered a part of either of them anymore. The wheels on his suitcase provided a soundtrack for his and Hermann’s conversation, but there was nothing else. It was unsettling.

“I don’t understand how they can just send us back home without our things,” Hermann insisted, for what might have been the thousandth time. “I thought up all of those equations and did all of the work, and I want to have it in my possession.”

“Why, so you can wave it at the kids who picked on you in high school?” Newt questioned, finding himself relatively detached from the whole idea. There was nothing he could do to get all of his samples back, and besides, what would he do with them if he could? It’s not like he had a lab sitting and readily awaiting his arrival anywhere. It had been years since he joined the Jaeger project; he didn’t even have an apartment anymore.

He must have said some of that out loud, though; Hermann stopped walking, staring at Newt with a familiar glint in his eye. It was the same way he looked when he’d agreed to Drift with Newt so many weeks ago, an expression that Newt liked to believe he had created; it meant, in essence, that they were about to do something they shouldn’t.

“We’ll stay,” he stated, like it was that simple.

Newt sputtered. “What – Hermann, what do you mean, _we’ll stay_? The marshal was pretty clear in telling us that we weren’t needed here anymore.”

“That he was,” Hermann agreed, but it didn’t seem to bother him much. “It seems to me that neither of us happen to have anywhere else to go, however, and if we go back and pretend to have something vitally important to do – you can do that, perhaps, if you try – no one will be able to tell us no.”

“The marshal-”

“Will probably shake his head and move onto a bigger problem,” Hermann stopped Newt, grinning just a little bit. “We take up two bunks and a small lab in one corner of the entire Shatterdome; we are not his most urgent eviction.”

\--

They were his most urgent eviction.

He was, however, willing to make some compromises in order to get rid of them, and that is how they ended up in an isolated house near the coastline, with a basement for their technology and a wooden porch that creaked underfoot.

Newton was delighted; Hermann was less than so.

“I don’t understand how we could have possibly been an unnecessary burden to the people of the dome,” he muttered under his breath, jiggling the doorknob helplessly as the door stuck in its frame. He tried shoving against it with his shoulder and kicking at it, neither of which were wise and both of which left his leg throbbing, and finally decided to rest his forehead against the wood and _will_ the door to open.

He had a wonderful, beautiful brain. It should have figured out telekinesis by now.

Unfortunately, it had not, and Newton moved him out of the way to try the door himself. There was a lot of grunting and pulling and cursing, and Hermann enjoyed it as much as he could in his current sour mood, but eventually the door was open and they were stumbling inside, fingers freezing

The walls were covered in cracked white paint and the front room was completely empty of furniture. “Charming,” Hermann scoffed, dragging his suitcase across the creaking floorboards. “I wonder, did we get the same beds we’ve been sleeping in for the past few years?”

“Probably,” Newton replied. He, however, was grinning from ear to ear. “But hey, we’ve got all of our experiments and samples downstairs, don’t we?”

It had slipped Hermann’s mind at some point that his partner was an eternal optimist.

\--

“Come on, Hermann, it really isn’t so bad.” Newt was trying to find Hermann’s shoulder in the sudden darkness; he ended up patting what might have been a face instead. “I’m sure the power will come back on in a few minutes. It always does.”

Three months into their stay in the Shackerdome – _heh_ – and everything was still going as terribly as it had been on the first day. The doors never opened when you wanted them to, and they certainly didn’t lock. Privacy was a myth and there was not enough power in twenty miles to give them the sort of juice they needed to get anything done.

But there was a view of the ocean that Newt still couldn’t get over, and they had plenty of blankets for when the heating broke. They had cars to get to the city and plenty of food stocked up in the cabinets, plus a coffeemaker and a kettle. It was home. It was wonderful.

“A few minutes is plenty long enough for you to lose track of everything you’ve done today, Newton,” Hermann replied, and yes, okay, Newt’s hand was definitely covering at least part of his mouth. “We were doing so _well_.” He sighed heavily.

Newt, quite suddenly, found himself in the midst of an epiphany.

“Let’s fix up the Shackerdome!” he cried, pulling his hand away and running in what he thought might be the general direction of the stairs. He ran into a table. “Shit!” Something shattered. (He hoped it was Hermann’s; at least then it wasn’t going to slither away.) “Listen, Hermann, we’re – we’re both _geniuses_ , certifiably, and I’m sure it can’t be too hard to figure out how to fix up-”

The lights came on. Hermann shot a skeptical look in Newt’s general direction and went back to the notebook in front of him.

\--

A crash upstairs signaled to Hermann that Newton was back from whatever adventure he had been on today. It was the subsequent crashes, however, that gave him reason to be concerned; he pushed away from his desk and hurried up the stairs, determinedly ignoring the way they gave and screeched underneath his unsteady steps.

“Newton?” he called out, turning the corner as quickly as his leg would allow.

The door was on the ground, on top of what appeared to be a body and several smaller pieces of wood. A paint bucket lay on its side next to the entire catastrophe, label staring up accusingly at Hermann as though there were something he might have done to stop its fall.

“Newton?” he tried again, kicking at one of the boards in an attempt to dislodge it.

Everything shifted. From somewhere inside the mess, Newton groaned, and then it all shifted up and he was crawling out from underneath everything, glasses crooked and smile broad. “Hello, Hermann!”

It was difficult for Hermann to avoid sounding like the disciplining parent Newton had obviously never had at the best of times. Now he was finding it nearly impossible. “Is this – what did you do? What are you _going_ to do?”

“I _told_ you,” Newton huffed, straightening out his glasses. “We’re going to fix up the house.”

This was not a new topic of discussion. The house was falling apart underneath their feet, and if they didn’t fix it up at all, it was likely that it wouldn’t be around much longer. That was sort of the point, though, wasn’t it? That they only be a temporary fixture in this part of the world? The kaiju attacks were done and there was nothing left to calculate. Newton’s samples were starting to wither and die off in front of them, growing less informative every time they were examined.

This was the state of the world they had created at the Shatterdome, and Newton’s attempts to rebuild something was some sort of desperate attempt to rebuild a time where he might yet have made a real name for himself. Drifting with a kaiju was the closest he had ever come, and he wanted that recognition.

Hermann wouldn’t have known any of this if he hadn’t Drifted, as well, though, so he didn’t mention it. Instead, he rolled his eyes and made his way back toward the basement. “You may do what you like, Newton, but I am in no state to be nailing anything down.”

It occurred to him that he might have meant that in more ways than one.

\--

Flashes of unfamiliar creatures, limping and bleeding but still very much alive. A bright yellow eye the size of the moon, staring down with unwarranted cruelty. Explosions, inhuman shrieks, bright flashes of red, yellow, orange, blue –

Newt woke up shaking, legs tangled in the sheets and hands clawing at his shirt. The light was on and fingers were brushing his hair away, gentle, shaking almost as badly as his own.

“Newton? Newton, are you alright?”

Hermann was leaning over him, looking more concerned than Newt might have ever seen him – which, really, that was saying something, wasn’t it? Only Newt didn’t much want to think about anything right now, couldn’t be bothered with focusing on something other than the flutter of his breathing and the tightness in his chest.

“Newton, are you – what can I do?” Hermann asked, still leaning over him, waiting for an answer that Newt really didn’t have just then.

He sat up, pushing Hermann away from him, and shifted so his feet were on the solid floor, hands gripping the sheets tight enough to turn white even now. It had been months since the Drift, months since the breach closed, months even since they moved out of the Shatterdome and into their little shack in the middle of nowhere. And still the nightmares came, those final moments of an entire species as they screamed and burned and –

There was no way to verbalize those feelings. If anyone understood, it would have been Hermann, but he didn’t seem to be having similar issues. He was getting on fine with his numbers and his physics, set in stone and anchored in the present, living world. His was a theoretical science; it was Newt who handled the remains of a dead species and watched them writhe on his desk, in their glass jars, in his hands.

There had been no need to care for them before. He could remember chopping the pieces of kaiju up mercilessly, leaving remains on Hermann’s desk after a particularly bad argument. He could remember throwing them out, even, getting rid of a material that seemed endless.

It wasn’t endless anymore. It was dying out and he was responsible, at least in part, for the end of an entire civilization. If he hadn’t helped destroy, he would have _been_ destroyed. What sort of ultimatum was that?

 _Can’t do anything about it now, anyway_. “Would it be too demanding of me to ask for some water?” he asked, voice raspy and thick. He cleared his throat. “Please?”

“Of course not.” Hermann shuffled out of the room. Newt tried not to think about the fact that he’d forgotten his cane. It probably didn’t mean anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> ALSO, Vanessa isn't in this fic because I haven't read the novelization, I've only seen the film - an absurd number of times, really - so I didn't include her and probably will not at all, although I considered it. Sorry if this offends anyone!


End file.
